


The Queen's Gambit

by soundingsea



Category: Chess (Board Game)
Genre: Don't Have to Know Canon, F/F, Geeky, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 14:45:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soundingsea/pseuds/soundingsea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What's the difference between an agile startup with user-curated content and a lumbering dinosaur with user-surly everything?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Queen's Gambit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Thanks for stellar last-minute beta reading from afrocurl, justhuman, and minim_calibre (and as always, ironchefjoe). All errors are my own because I couldn't stop adding stuff. Characters and situations stolen shamelessly from life, but hopefully the serial numbers are filed off beyond recognition. :)
> 
> (I am told the jargon needs explaining; there's a glossary at the end.)

Half-time at Sunday night pub trivia is when the volume kicks up to a dull roar. While score sheets are off being graded, groans erupt from teams that find Wikipedia disagreeing with their now-immutable answers for the first three rounds. 

Vera sets her phone on the table, gulps her imperial Russian stout, and grimaces. "Here's a trivia question for you: what's the difference between an agile startup with user-curated content and a lumbering dinosaur with user-surly everything?"

Xue laughs, a clear peal that resonates. "We're relevant and they're obsolete?" She raises her pint in a mock toast, and Wil snickers across the table from Vera. Teimour clinks his glass against Xue's and drinks.

"Not so much," Vera says grimly. "Valleywag will post about it tomorrow; we're the shiniest new yacht in a certain CEO's flotilla." With a pang, she watches the smile fade from Xue's face. 

Wil stops laughing. "You've got to be shitting me. I just jumped from there last year. I'm not going back to writing the stodgiest SQL in existence."

"Wait, is this as serious as when we had those two sprints called _Implement Everything Cameron Said We Already Offer_?" Teimour finishes his beer in two long swallows, slams his glass down in disgust. 

Xue shudders. "That month sucked. Especially for those of us in front-end dev." 

The waiter comes by, and ordering more beer is a momentary distraction. Wil goes for a Dunkelweizen, Teimour an ironic hipster lager, Xue a hoppy IPA, and Vera another stout. Predictable, all of them.

The trivia MC announces that teams can pick up their sheets, and Vera slides past Xue, with a light brush against her shoulder, and makes her way to the stage. She scans the team names, noting that there are some pretty high scores, and finally locates theirs, with _Allumwandlung_ written in Wil's block capitals.

Her co-workers are still abuzz with the news when she gets back, score sheet in hand.

"This gonna be IP-only?" Teimour asks. "Or an acqui-hire situation? Because I'm as employed as I want to be right now." 

"I'm assuming any offer would come with golden handcuffs," Xue says. "They can't run the intellectual property without the talent."

Wil nods. "Dude may have more yachts than sense, but he's got to know that."

"Check your work mail, and you'll know everything I do," Vera says. "Well, Cameron doesn't name Goliath in his mail, but he dropped enough hints at the holiday party that it's not hard to narrow it down."

Their pub trivia arch-rivals _The Cliff Claven All-Stars_ are in the lead at the half, and Vera can only hope they are slowed down by the round of Tall Boys that earns them. 

"Hey, Wilhelm," Teimour asks. "Why _Allumwandlung_? Other than your whole German fixation."

"Means complete promotion, in chess," Wil explains. "And it's not a fixation; I just dig industrial music and good beer."

"Oh, how you can turn a pawn into a queen?" Vera preens, pursing her lips in a faux-regal expression until Teimour's reaction cracks her up.

"Right, you can go for a knight or bishop or rook, too," Xue says. "Me, I like adding a bishop to the endgame."

Talk of chess openings and classic problems fades as round four starts up. Vera can feel the mood shifting, lighthearted fun turning to pensive worry. She wishes she'd waited until morning to say anything about the buy-out. Maybe it will be fine; maybe nothing will change.

* * *

The next morning, Vera's mouth tastes like something crawled in there and died. But showing up to work isn't optional what with the big meeting, so she hurries through getting ready. She picks her MongoDB shirt, because no SQL is about the amount she wants to deal with today. (Unfortunately, not an option when SQL-R-Us buys you.)

Half the team is already in the glass-sided conference room when Vera arrives at too-early-o'clock. Xue's still over at her desk, so Vera detours that direction after dropping off her coat and defogging her glasses. 

"Morning," Vera says. "You want me to grab you some coffee and a seat in the fishbowl?"

"Hey, check you out," says Xue, eying Vera's shirt. "You're web scale." Her gaze lingers just half a moment longer than it needs to, and her grin is the slightest bit wicked. "Sure, coffee would be great. My head is splitting."

Yeah, this is kinda a tight shirt. That's why Vera doesn't usually wear it to work, although it's thematically appropriate; it's a men's-cut small, because the medium was too boxy. Of course, the small is ultra-clingy. That's what the flannel shirt over it is for: making her look appropriate in front of the guys.

Vera hits the kitchenette, pours two black coffees liberally laced with espresso, and makes it to the conference room just a bit ahead of Teimour, who sets a blanket-covered car seat on the floor next to him.

"Judit on shift today?" Vera asks.

"Yeah, her residency hours are ridiculous. At least Maia will sleep through a short meeting. Well, this better fucking be short."

Xue comes in, writes a URL on the whiteboard, and settles between Vera and Wil. "Ah, my Canadiano," she says, sipping her drink. "Just what the doctor ordered."

"It's called a depth charge, you Canuck carpetbagger," Vera says. Xue kicks her under the table, and Vera pulls her feet up into a cross-legged sitting position.

"You're both wrong. It's called unutterably vile and a waste of good espresso," says Wil, whose tiny cup looks ridiculous in his large hand.

"You didn't write an app?" Teimour asks, glancing at the whiteboard before thumbing in the URL on his iPhone. 

Xue shrugs. "And leave you Cult of Steve types waiting for it to be approved? Instead, we have bingo now. No waiting."

Even people who aren't devteam look to be playing, which is equal parts cute and hilarious. Anti-boredom to the highest level, like any proper startup.

"Maybe _you_ have bingo," says Cameron, their CEO. "All I have is weird floating artifacts."

"Get a real phone, boss." Xue sticks out her tongue. "Developing for that Samsung shit is worse than IE 8."

The video conference starts, and most everyone quiets down. Vera listens intently, and gets a word in the second row right away. " _Strategic_ should have been the free space," she whispers to Wil. That earns her a behave-yourself look from Cameron, so she hops onto the backchannel. ChatOps is good for more than just deployments and war rooms.
    
    
    No fair tapping breadth when he was talking about breath!  
    
    What are you, homophone-phobic?

Vera is going to miss this. She swallows more of her depth charge, savoring the bitterness, and tries to take a mental snapshot of exactly how perfect their team is at this moment. Maybe this afternoon she'll switch to the 15-year Scotch sitting at Wil's desk. Gotta finish the office booze, since that's one thing that won't stick around under their new overlords. And probably not the only one.

* * *

There's mutiny afoot and it's only two weeks into the new regime. Cameron looks to be fighting a losing battle, but he sallies forth again. "The new leadership team wants to make sure everyone gets the same opportunities and is communicating clearly."

"What does that even mean?" Wil asks. He's leaning all the way back with his feet on his desk and a 17" MacBookPro perched on his legs. His cinema displays are going unused.

"Yeah," Xue agrees. "How could we be more clear than years of auditable chat logs?" 

"With all decisions documented by acceptance of a pull request." Teimour adds.

Wil rolls his eyes. "I think it means that the new leadership wants to be able to walk up to your desk and see what you're doing."

"Not that they are actually _here_ ," Vera adds.

"Commit logs from last night will tell them what I'm doing," Teimour says. "With fucking peer review, built in." Vera chuckles, but Cameron looks pained.

"Come on now, Tei," Cameron says. "You need to work from the office. Every day. We all do. The new core hours--"

"Cameron, man, I'm home with my daughter during those fucking core hours. We agreed to that. You ever have a problem with my output? Am I hearing a corporate stooge talking here?"

"We need to show them that we're serious. Not, you know..." Cameron trails off, biting his tongue.

Vera supplies, "Too startupy?" She regrets her tone pretty much immediately; too late to make peace here, though.

Cameron winces. "Basically."

"This is bullshit," Teimour says flatly. He drops his laptop in his messenger bag, slings it over his shoulder, and grabs his coat and bike helmet. Even a midwest winter doesn't stop the real die-hard cyclists.

"It's not forever," Cameron says, but he doesn't sound like he's even convinced himself.

"You got that right," Teimour says as he walks out. 

For the rest of the day, the mood in the office, to put it frankly, sucks. Xue sticks around despite their urgings, but Wil and Vera decamp to the coffeeshop downstairs. They can see the office wifi from there, so that basically counts as being at work. Vera adds autodiscovery to their memcached cluster, while Wil fiddles around with one of their Graphite dashboards. Vera hopes this isn't a classic Titanic plus deck chairs situation. Her recruiterspam has started looking more appealing, and Wil has stopped deleting his unread.

* * *

Hashbrowns sizzle on the griddle, and the waitstaff calls out for Adam and Eve on a raft (wreck'em). Cold air enters as patrons shuffle in and out of the tiny diner on the edge of campus. It might be almost spring, but winter is hanging on with a vengeance. Vera and Teimour perch on stools all the way down at the end, where an ancient payphone was replaced by a giant laminated picture of itself just so the staff could keep telling new generations of undergrads to move on in towards the phone.

Not too many students here at 7am, but the counter is full anyhow, with retirees, university staffers, and opposite-shift ex-coworkers finding overlap in their schedules.

"You didn't fly out to interview?" Vera asks, then tries the consistently terrible coffee. It's still too hot to drink. 

"Uber is always on surge pricing around SFO," Teimour says with a rakish grin, stabbing his omelet and eating a big bite with cheese and mushrooms.

Vera scoffs. "How is that even a reason?"

"If you're a Y Combinator-backed startup with offices at 5th and Mission, that sounds like a convincing reason," Teimour says. "Plus, they didn't have to pay for the Google Hangout, and they could watch me code. I'll visit when Judit finishes this rotation."

"So they just did a killer Series A and are all set to disrupt B to C, or somesuch trendy alphabet soup?" Vera cuts another wobbly cross-section of her three pancakes, nudges it into an eddy of maple syrup, and pops it in her mouth. A drip of syrup hits her lip, and she captures it with a flick of her tongue.

"Yup. And they've got a codebase pylint loves. You should seriously think about it. Full stack, just the way you like it." He waves a fork towards her plate.

"In pancakes and in tech," she agrees. "It's just..." 

"You don't want to leave on their terms, take yourself off the board," he says. "You want to leave on yours. I get it. I was asking Judit if I should, you know, and she said, 'Which will you regret more? Going, or staying?'"

"She's a wise woman. I don't feel like I need to go down with this ship or whatever." Vera laughs. "Leave that to O Captain My Cameron, right?"

"But not you," Teimour says. "You can't just lie back and think of California."

"Hell, no," Vera shudders. "Glassholes at every turn? Give me flyover country."

* * *

Although they're stretched thin after a month without Teimour, Cameron doesn't cancel their talk at Celerity. It's too high-profile a conference to skip. There are enough devteam members staying home that Vera and Wil can still speak as planned, and Xue takes Teimour's ticket. There's a decent front-end track, and she wants to take in an Angular tutorial.

The hallway track at Celerity is a minefield of questions they don't want to go on record answering. Wil, Xue, and Vera plan to take turns watching each other's backs, inching forward through days in overly air-conditioned hotel ballrooms, nights poolside where one step away from each other could mean press (or worse, recruiters) descending. 

The giant hot tub is pleasantly bubbling when they come downstairs the first night, but it's empty, as if other conference attendees just left. Wil is the only one who packed swimwear, and he shucks his shirt and hops in. 

"I didn't even think about it being warm enough to swim," Vera admits, kicking off her shoes and sitting on the edge of the hot tub, dipping her feet in the water. She's changed from jeans and a flannel to shorts and a t-shirt, but it's only marginally warmer out here than in the AC.

"Hotels always have hot tubs," Xue says. "But I'll be damned if I'm wearing a bikini for this crowd." She saunters down the hot tub steps in a sun dress which clings to her legs as the hem gets wet. "And then we have the hot tub to ourselves. Oh, well."

Will stretches out underwater, kicking lazily. "The gender ratio actually looks a tiny bit better this year."

"Yeah, there was a line for the restroom once today," Xue says. "Surprised me."

Vera adds wryly, "And only about 90% of my conversations were an automatic Bechdel fail."

"Yeah, these conferences are always such a sausage-fest," Xue says. "Present company excluded, of course."

"I'm honored to be considered just one of the girls," Wil says, splashing Xue. Dark drops of water stand out on her light green dress. She splashes back, and Wil gasps, laughing. 

They settle down, Xue sitting in the hot tub near where Vera's legs dangle. 

"This is perfect," Wil says. The no-glassware signs don't forbid plastic lowballs of cognac, and he reaches back for his, savors a sip.

"Pretty much," Xue agrees. "Except for how Vera isn't in here with us..." She tugs on Vera's right leg. "Come on in. The water's fine!"

"Hey!" Vera protests, but only half-heartedly, because her feet are the only part of her currently warm. She slides on down into the water, wrapping a leg around one of Xue's. "If I have to get wet, so do you!" Pinned in place, Xue can only laugh and protest when Vera splashes her. 

They drink, and talk, and wish like hell Tei were there. And if Xue nuzzles Vera the third or fourth time she reaches past for her drink, well, all they have is the now. And Wil's not looking. Maybe. Probably.

Eventually Wil retires to his room, while Vera and Xue head to the one they are sharing. It was too late for the hotel to switch Vera's reservation to two queens, and Teimour's room must have been snapped up as soon as he released it, so they have one king bed between the two of them. 

Xue wins rock-paper-scissors and showers first. When she comes out in a towel and unpins her mostly-dry hair, Vera bites her lip. It's late, and they've been drinking, and she shouldn't go putting moves on her colleague. So she resolutely looks away when the towel drops, and heads into the bathroom. After her own shower she dries off as best as she can in the steam, then realizes her PJs are out in her bag. 

Vera's not nearly as slender as Xue, and one of these hotel towels isn't really going to cover as much as it should. She rigs it as best as she can, clutching it so it stays closed over her breasts, and opens the bathroom door.

Xue's lying diagonally across the bed in an oversized navy Coffeescript shirt and a pair of plaid boxer shorts, and she's raided the minibar. "Hey," she says. "Look what I found."

Vera can feel Xue's eyes on her as she pulls on her own shorts, then turns her back and reaches down for a tanktop. Her breasts bob alarmingly, and she feels heat rush to her face as the towel comes loose. She lets it drop and pulls the tanktop on, then turns back to Xue, trying to look casual.

"Did you know you blush all the way down?" Xue asks, handing Vera a miniature bottle of scotch and then trailing two fingers from Vera's cheek down her neck, over her clavicle, to the swell of her breast. "Ah, white girls. So adorable."

"I can't help it," Vera admits. "You're just so delish."

"Hey, it's okay," Xue says, pulling Vera onto the bed. "You don't have to justify looking. This is a judgement-free zone."

"I just don't want to be like all the dudebros, you know? 'Oh, you're such a hot Asian chick; sudo make me a sandwich.'"

Xue laughs, wrinkling her nose in mock disgust. "I know you don't see me as some kind of creepy fantasy object just because I'm Chinese. You're drooling over the fact that my sites look better than xkcd, though."

"I might fetishize your front-end skills just a little," Vera admits. "I mean, I don't own any jeans skinny enough to wear to a Node.js meetup, but you totally pull that off."

"Well, maybe I'm attracted to your exotic command-line magic," Xue says huskily. "Talk regex to me." And when Xue moves forward, it's none of that lean-in crap from pop tech literature. Xue knows what she wants, and Vera can't help but follow.

Kissing Xue is everything and nothing like what Vera expected, soft and pliant but firm and nimble, hands delicately exploring, sliding the strap of Vera's tanktop down her shoulder.

* * *

The next morning, Xue brings up some coffee, kisses Vera on the nose, and says she'll catch up with her at the Ignite reception if not before. Vera pulls a pillow over her face and goes back to sleep for another hour. Coffee is for thought leaders, and Vera is still awash in sensation from the early morning hours.

Vera does eventually pry herself out of bed, and runs into Wil at the talk on BGP route hacking. She wonders if he can tell anything just by looking at her, but he seems oblivious. She opens her Air, takes a spin through the interwebs.

A TechCrunch article about their corporate parent's latest round of acquisitions is sitting on the front page of Hacker News. Shit; their reporters are here. Vera scans the article; nothing about hot developer on developer action. Better check the comments, though...

"Why are you reading that shit? Hacker News is weaponized privilege." Wil opens the draft of his guest blog post where he's deconstructing the bubble around tech workers. 

"Just wanted to see if they mentioned us. I know, I know. Never read the comments." Vera opens their slide deck instead, looks meaningfully at Wil over her glasses. He switches tabs to their shared copy and changes a slide title.

Time stretches like a rubber band until they give their talk in the last Tuesday slot, and then Vera snaps back into focus. They run long, which is just as well; no time for Q&A. The airwalls need to open up so the whole ballroom can be used for the five-minute Ignite talks.

In line for questionable open-bar beer, Vera runs into Susan, from Celerity's organizing team. With her usual lack of preamble, Susan starts up in top gear.

"Vera! I wanted to tell you about this passion project of mine, sort of a mentorship to bring underserved populations into software development. Will you join us for lunch tomorrow, talk with some of the VCs?"

Vera mumbles some form of assent, then looks around for Wil. Shit; she's two steps behind him instead of one, and a guy wearing the staff shirt of the biggest booth in the ex-hall has come in on a sharp angle of attack.

"Think of it as Dropbox meets Facebook, only with real privacy. We need ninjas like you..." Vera can see Wil's defenses coming apart. The recruiter nudges him into the ballroom, and he doesn't look back.

Vera finds a seat up front near Xue, who glances back at Wil deep in conversation with the recruiter and shakes her head. "He'll be riding a company bus from SF to the South Bay in under a month, and talking about how they are totally killing it right now. Shit."

"Wil's not a brogrammer," Vera protests. "He cares about inequality. He wrote an editorial against gentrification."

"Does it matter?" Xue looks at her phone, then puts it back in her pocket. "Our friends are getting picked off one at a time. You want to fix that, change the game."

"What, try a coup? Cameron thinks that being assimilated by the database of Borg is just peachy fucking keen."

Xue sighs. "Look, I didn't want to tell you this last night, but... I'm not going back. I talked to a startup yesterday. A real startup, like we used to be. Because when someone tells you it will be like a startup inside a big company, they're lying."

The applause starts up for the first speaker, and Vera's heart hammers in time with it.

* * *

After Ignite, Xue wanders off with people she knows from IRC. She doesn't come back to their room before Vera's asleep, and though her side of the bed's been slept in, she's gone when Vera wakes up. Vera hits a couple of morning sessions, but doesn't see Wil or Xue anywhere. Most of the hotel appears to be in an AT&T dead zone, and she feels stupid texting them anyhow. Lunch with Susan and the venture capitalists is a decent antidote to the sick feeling Vera has that everything is about to change, and maybe not for the better.

They eat outside, because everything in California is outside, and there aren't even mosquitos. The food is exquisite, and the conversation is even better. Vera leaves with hope for the future and, better yet, something of a plan.

That evening, Vera's flying out of SJC. Wil's flight is out of SFO, and he heads out saying something about hitching a ride with somebody from Twitter. (She isn't sure if this means someone he knows from using Twitter, or someone who works at Twitter; impossible to tell, without asking awkward questions about who is actually going to poach him. Said poaching being inevitable, at this point.)

Takes all of ten minutes to get to SJC, and the terminal is pint-sized. Vera's charging her phone at the gate and trying to catch up on the most important email first, since inflight wireless isn't a sure bet. They announce general boarding, but she can give it a couple of minutes. Then she hears a quiet "hey".

Vera looks up, and is ridiculously grateful to see Xue. She wants to jump up and kiss her, but doesn't know if this would be a one-sided thing.

"I thought you said you weren't coming back," Vera says.

"I'm not, not right now," Xue says. "Changed my ticket to Vancouver. Might as well visit family while I'm in this time zone."

"Cool."

The silence stretches out between them, words unsaid and impossible to say. It's broken by the final boarding call for Vera's flight.

Xue reaches out. Her fingertips are light on Vera's cheek, then electric on her lower lip. "Hey, when you make your move, let me know."

"Promise," Vera manages. 

Xue smiles, then walks away. Vera watches her until she disappears into the crowd, then only just makes it onto the plane before the boarding door closes.

* * *

The watery sunlight of an autumn morning dapples the polished wood furniture in the boardroom. Would be killer glare if it were trying to out-shine a projector, but this isn't that kind of meeting. Even before you get to C-level, this giant mega-corp likes its meetings full of persuasive conversation and not much content. Funny, since they were once about data.

Bobby, the guy who's making the pitch, sounds like he's reciting a well-worn line of patter, and he probably is. After corporate showed Cameron the door at the beginning of the summer, what was left of their team started reporting to Bobby over a speakerphone. Meeting him isn't much of an improvement. Couple of his lackeys are in the room, but aren't even looking at Vera.

"Having you at the table will let us disrupt more effectively," Bobby continues, and Vera realizes she's been zoning out. She wants to reach for her phone, but nobody else in this room will play tech-industry buzzword bingo with her. And that, she realizes, is what's wrong here.

She needs to know if she's just a ticky-box to them. "Much like Marissa Mayer or Sheryl Sandberg, right?"

"Absolutely," Bobby says, beaming. "We need more women in our engineering leadership. That's the reason we wanted you to fly in today."

He pauses, weighing her reaction.

"No fate but what you make, right?" Vera stands up, pushes in her chair.

"You won't be vested for ten months yet," says the third random on the left.

If they want to play options games, she'll give as good as she gets. She leans in, and doesn't even laugh at how much bullshit that is. "Funny thing about tech bubbles. You'd think that banks in the Valley would care about how much runway you have, or what your burn rate looks like, but instead they want players. And I'm ready to put some great pieces on the board."

Before she leaves Redwood City, Vera texts Teimour, Xue, and Wil.
    
    
    Allumwandlung. Angel round. You in?

Vera drops her phone on the passenger seat of the rental car, rolls down the windows, turns the music up, and hits the gas. As she merges onto the highway, her phone vibrates with replies.

**Author's Note:**

> acqui-hire - slang for an acquisition where the employees of the acquired company are hired at the acquiring company
> 
> agile - a software development methodology that allows for rapid prototyping and iteration.
> 
> angel round - venture capital funding
> 
> B to C - business to consumer (as opposed to when businesses sell to other businesses)
> 
> BGP route hacking - ["There's a hole in the world. Feels like we ought to have known."](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/bgp-hijacking-belarus-iceland/)
> 
> brogrammer - fratboy douchebag programmer. Sadly common.
> 
> ChatOps - how chat is used in operations (to share power)
> 
> commit logs from last night - [joke site collecting the public swearing in people's comments when they publish code](http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com)
> 
> dudebro - see brogrammer (though, can be less-technical)
> 
> front-end dev - person making the parts of software that users can see.
> 
> full stack - all the layers in software, from user-facing to under-the-hood database interfaces to infrastructure.
> 
> glasshole - self-important individual wearing Google Glass
> 
> golden handcuffs - financial incentives to stay at a company for a certain amount of time
> 
> Google Hangout - free videoconferencing and screensharing
> 
> graphite dashboards - a tool that lets you see how your application or servers are performing.
> 
> Hacker News - the news outlet for Y Combinator. Realm of dudebros with 0th world problems.
> 
> IP-only - a corporate buy-out where only the intellectual property, not the employees, get transferred to the new owners.
> 
> lean in - rage-inducing idea of privileged Facebook COO that if other women just tried harder they would magically vanquish sexism
> 
> memcached cluster - infrastructure component that speeds up websites
> 
> MongoDB - a NoSQL database (considered pretty hipster)
> 
> Node.js - front-end tool with the rep for being popular among hipsters.
> 
> offices at 5th and Mission - popular San Francisco office space
> 
> pull request - offering some code for someone else to approve
> 
> pylint - a syntax checker for the Python language. It complains about code that doesn't meet certain standards.
> 
> recruiterspam - the emails that people in tech get all the time trying to poach them. Often addressed to "JOB SEEKER" and wildly, hilariously off-target.
> 
> regex - regular expressions. difficult-to-read pattern-matching often considered wizardry, even by many in tech.
> 
> series A - venture capital round
> 
> sprints - in agile project management, a defined interval of time to work on specific tasks, often two weeks.
> 
> SQL - standard query language. Used to talk to databases.
> 
> sudo make me a sandwich - [an xkcd comic](http://xkcd.com/149/)
> 
> Uber - a car service popular among techies. Charges higher "surge pricing" (3x or more) a lot.
> 
> web scale - [a joke from a parody video about MongoDB](http://mongodb-is-web-scale.com)
> 
> VCs - venture capitalists.
> 
> Valleywag - tech industry gossip rag
> 
> Y Combinator - a startup incubator (offers funding and mentorship)


End file.
